


River Run Dry

by Gileonnen



Category: Bottom of the River (Music Video), Bottom of the River - Delta Rae (Song)
Genre: Cancer, Family Legacies, Gen, Good Intentions as Paving Stones, Masks and Mirrors, Secret Wars, Water Magic, Witchcraft and Demonology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-05 01:15:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the woman in white learned to see devils, and what happened when they learned to see her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	River Run Dry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Truth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/gifts).



Her grandfather used to say that his line of work passed from father to firstborn son, like that was a law he'd brought down the mountain with him. Whenever he came up from Alabama, he'd sit in her mama's best chair with his jeans pinned over the stump of his knee and his tobacco pipe cupped in one hand, and he'd pass out prophecies and presents mixed. When he had enough whiskey in him, sometimes he'd even tell stories about the work he used to do in the war.

She liked books and lacy gloves well enough, but she liked stories about devils even better. Her father never talked about devils, although he kept an iron spike propped on nails over the door and turned all the mirrors to face the wall.

Her grandfather never said as much, but she thought her father disappointed him.

She'd wheel him up and down the lane, when she got strong enough to push his chair. They'd roll across the mixed gravel and shell of the drive and then onto the sidewalk, gliding under cascades of white catalpa blossoms and crab-apples twisted with wisteria and Spanish moss. They passed the doors of the clapboard church just as the bells rang ten, deep and regular as a pulse. There, her grandfather touched her hand to still her.

"There are demons here, child," he said. "Look for them. See if you have the gift."

"In front of the church?"

"Devils everywhere, if you know how to look."

 _I'm no one's firstborn son,_ she thought, but she turned to skim the streets anyway.

There weren't many people out at this hour. An old woman in a white windbreaker, rolling her walker over the cracks in the sidewalk. A man sloping down the path with his hands in his jacket pockets. They seemed like ordinary people to her, worn down like ordinary people were supposed to be.

She looked back at the church. The late morning sun struck the windows and turned them into mirrors. She saw the old woman reflected there, her shoulders hunched up around her ears. A pretty woman in a black lace shirt, sitting on a bench and watching the flowers shift in the breeze. A man with a face of flame and shadow.

"That man's wearing a mask," she said under her breath.

"Now, look back." She turned back to the man kicking up a swirl of sunburnt crab-apple petals. He looked only a few years older than she was, with a scruff of beard and acne scars over his cheeks. She might've smiled at him, if she'd passed him.

Soft as cotton wool, her grandfather told her, "See that face he's wearing? _That's_ a mask."

* * *

_Father to firstborn son,_ her grandfather used to say, but after that spring morning at the church he didn't say it anymore.

She'd push his chair down to the river on summer weekends, and together they'd watch fishermen drifting on the sluggish current. "Water's low," he said, the first time they saw a man chug by with half a six-pack of beer on ice in a cooler. "Doesn't look like he got any bites today."

"Hasn't rained for a couple of weeks. Bad fishing weather, my mama says."

"Makes the river run smooth as a mirror." He tucked a wad of tobacco into his pipe and lit it, shaking out the match and tossing it into the still water. "They used to duck witches, you know. Throw 'em in a pond to see if they floated or sank, and if they floated, it proved they were witches. Ignorant assholes."

She leaned over the rail between the river and the walking trail, catching sight of herself shadowed in the muddy water. Long, blond hair curtaining her face, gull-white dress fanning out over her thighs. While she looked on, her reflection in the river freed a hand from the rail to twinkle its fingers at her.

She hadn't stirred.

"How do you tell if someone's a witch?" she asked.

Her grandfather's laugh rattled in his chest. "Show her a mirror, and wait to see which one blinks first."

* * *

Her father got the call a few days before Thanksgiving. He had them packed and ready to fly down to Alabama by the time she got home from school.

"I just don't know why he didn't see someone," her mother kept saying, while they waited to board. "They could have treated this before it got this bad. They could've put him on oxygen or given him chemo. He's a veteran, isn't he? He could've gone to the VA hospital--"

"Mama," she said eventually, when she got tired of fiddling with the strap of her overnight bag and pretending not to know. She reached for her mother's hand and squeezed it tight. "Pappy didn't fight in Vietnam. That wasn't his war."

Her mother was quiet for a little while. The announcer called for passengers to board for Chicago O'Hare, seating group one. "You know, I'd always hoped," her mother said eventually. Her eyes were fixed on their clasped hands. "I'd always hoped it was just some superstition you humored. Because it was kinder that way."

On the other side of her mother, her father stared down at his hands. She wondered what those hands had done, when only the man in the mirror was watching. "Sometimes I hoped it was, too."

"Did someone do this to him?" her mother asked. "Is this part of the war?"

"He did it to himself," said her father shortly. "He always did love his tobacco."

* * *

Her grandfather left her a mirror like a still pond, with a frame of golden wood. _To the firstborn daughter of my firstborn son,_ his will read. _May she always trust what she sees there._

She knew that she should have been grateful for the trust that he was placing in her. For being chosen. But with her father's hand on her shoulder and her grandfather cold in the ground, that charge felt like a weight no one had taught her to carry.

* * *

There was a war on, but who she was fighting or why, she couldn't have said. She sat in front of her mirror every night and watched her eyes, waiting for the blink that her grandfather had taught her to expect. Her reflection knew the game well, though, and it always kept pace.

"Just tell me something I can use," she begged. The girl in the mirror mouthed along with her in silent mockery until they both turned away, disgusted.

She wondered, sometimes, where the girl in the mirror went when she slammed the bedroom door behind her.

This line of work passed from father to firstborn son, her grandfather had said, through secrets shared when the winter nights came down and the labor of four hands working in concert. Even in her grandfather's stories, it was only the scent of salt and sulfur on the air, the shock of cold iron and silver on living skin. It would have been her father's task to teach her, if her mother had borne a boychild.

"Forget about the war," her father told her. "It won't come knocking if you don't go looking for it."

"At least teach me the work."

"Forget about the work, too."

There were no books to teach her what she needed, but she tried to learn the craft in secret all the same. In the public library, she crouched by a shelf of ancient encyclopedias with a book on the Salem Witchcraft Trials open over her knees. She found books of runes, lists of the trees sacred to the Celts and the Norse, and she read them under the covers with a flashlight against the darkness. She learned which plants were said to ward off demons, and which to draw them close.

One day she went down to the hardware store and got a chip each of oak, ash, and yew, which she burnt to ash and mixed with river clay.

She dipped her finger in the mix and scribed the her name on the mirror in rune-letters, watching her reflection through a maze of thick grey smears.

That anxious smile in the glass was the mirror of her own, and no more.

She turned it to face the wall.

* * *

"The lights are wrong, you know," said the woman in the library window.

At first, she almost walked on, unhearing. The days had begun to grow long again, loping toward summer in seven-league boots, and there was never time enough to stop and enjoy the crabapple blossoms or to hear a busker play. Her work would not wait; the _real world_ would not wait. If the woman hadn't knocked hard on the glass, then she might have passed her by.

That knock, though, seemed to fall on the inside of her skull. She turned back to the library window, and for the first time, she marked that the fluorescent overhead lights were out inside. The woman caught her looking, and winked.

Something about the woman was familiar, but she couldn't have said what. That black lace shirt wouldn't have been out of place at a funeral, but there was a wicked pleasure in her eyes that promised a good deal more than death.

 _Hold a mirror up to a witch, see which one blinks first._ She trained her eyes on the woman in black and asked, wary as a yearling doe, "What did you say about lights?"

"They're wrong," the woman answered. "You need sunlight or a candle flame to scry in a mirror. These--" and she swept a hand up to indicate the fluorescent lights behind her "--won't show you a damn thing."

She set down her satchel, padding toward the window on white ballet flats. She couldn't see herself mirrored there, no halo of blonde hair touched with the morning's first light, and she knew that it should frighten her to be so easily erased. Slowly, she brought her palm up to press against the pane. "Who are you?" she asked. "How do you know that?"

The woman smiled as she unfurled her hand against the other side of the glass. On one wrist, she wore a black cuff like a shackle. "I'm what you are. The heir to someone else's war."

It sounded at least partway true, and part of the truth was more than she'd had in a long time.

For a moment, she felt as though she stood upon a precipice. The long fall lay below, a river at the bottom like a sheet of silver. And at the end of that moment, she breathed in deep and said, "Teach me."

The woman's fingers closed on her own. Despite the lingering spring chill, they were warm and solid to the touch. "Come through the mirror to find me, and I will."

* * *

There were mirrors everywhere, now that she knew how to look. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried to integrate the song's lyrics with the music video's imagery, and the greatest disparity between them is the image of the son. Clearly the notion of family legacies is important to the story that the song is telling--but the story I tell is that of a firstborn daughter, and how she claims that legacy for herself.


End file.
